During a joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Feb. 5, President Donald Trump proposed a plan for the U.S. to seize control of Gaza and forcibly remove 2.3 million Palestinians from their homes, as he bragged that he would rebuild the war-devastated territory as a new “Middle East Riviera.” Trump’s plan, which called on both Egypt and Jordan to take in Gaza’s entire Palestinian population, was immediately rejected and condemned as ethnic cleansing by Arab governments, world leaders and human rights groups.
Trump’s Gaza plan, characterized as “horrifying” and “ridiculous” by some U.S. lawmakers, was proposed as the Hamas–Israel Gaza ceasefire agreement was in danger of collapse after Hamas accused Israel of violating the three-week ceasefire, endangering the scheduled release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners. Just prior to a Feb. 11, White House meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, where Trump doubled down on his Gaza plan, he threatened to withhold billions of dollars in U.S. aid to Jordan and Egypt unless the two nations agreed to take in all of Gaza’s Palestinian residents.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, international adviser for Jewish Voice for Peace and author of the new book titled, “Understanding Palestine & Israel,” published by Interlink Books. Here, she takes a critical look at Trump’s reckless Gaza plan and the virtually unanimous international denunciation of this criminal proposal.
PHYLLIS BENNIS: This is a plan that is rooted in and acknowledged a combination of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Ethnic cleansing is a crime. The deliberate expulsion of a population from a particular group is a crime against humanity. That doesn’t seem to have any relevance to Trump and his people. What’s clear is that he sees — I would say the world at the moment — but certainly at the moment he’s seeing Gaza from the eyes of a real estate agent.
Now, he’s not the first. Just a couple of years ago, his son-in-law Jared Kushner looked at the territory around Gaza and said, “Woah, we could do something with this. This is beautiful seaside country.” His special envoy, who is also historically a real estate broker, looked at it a couple of weeks ago and said, “I don’t know if I should say this, but all I see is 25 miles of prime sunset facing beachfront.”
Those are the words of somebody who’s an expert in knowing what sells, right? It’s not enough to be on a beach. You have to be on a beach that faces the sunset. And that’s what he knew.
So this is the vantage point of the Trump administration: His personal aggrandizement, personal enrichment, personal power. It’s not even a situation where Trump is reflecting some kind of accountability to one of the various factions of imperial rule in this country. You know, it’s not like everybody agrees. There’s sort of isolationists and sort of interventionists in various forms, but this isn’t even about that. This is about personal claim: “I am going to either buy it or steal it.” He’s been a little vague about how he would get it.
From whom he would get it is not at all clear. It doesn’t belong to Israel. And he certainly has shown no indication that he’s prepared to deal with Palestinians as people, with agency, with land with a nation of their own that he would have to deal with. None of that seems to be relevant. This is all about “I will take the land. I will get rid of this annoying population and I will manage to get rid of the hundreds of thousands of tons of debris that was left over. And we will build this Middle East Riviera.”
You know, if you want to say that it’s too badly destroyed for people to go back, there’s certainly a logic to that. Then the answer is, yeah.
And they have the right to return to their original homes. Eighty of the population of Gaza are themselves refugees from before the 5 or 7 or 10 times that they were made refugees again and again and again internally in this last 16 months because of Israeli bombing.
These are people who were expelled from their homes in what is now southern Israel, in what the Palestinians call the Nakba, the catastrophe of 1947-48, when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes. Half of what has been expelled this time — the Nakba was always seen, called the catastrophe — because it was always imagined it could never be that bad again, until October of 2023, when it began again.
And the Nakba 2.0 has now made more than twice that refugees over and over and over again.
SCOTT HARRIS: Phyllis, what are any possible plans that have been discussed internationally for an alternative to Donald Trump’s illegal and criminal plan to eliminate the Palestinian population from Gaza? Is there another neutral, military or civil authority to somehow preside over reconstruction and rehabilitation of that devastated land at this point?
PHYLLIS BENNIS: The possibility for governance — there was a conference in Beijing sponsored by China — of all the Palestinian factions, including Hamas, including Fatah and the political parties that are involved in the Palestinian Authority that has administrative control of small parts of the West Bank — where we should note is there’s major escalation underway. But they made a decision there, the Palestinian parties, that there would be a joint government.
Hamas made very clear they do not want to be part of the governance. They understand the problem with that. They are perfectly willing to have the other Palestinian parties collectively create a government to run Gaza. But all the questions remain of if people want to remain there, if rebuilding is the right thing to do, what would happen in the meantime?
That’s a years-long process. Where would they live in the meantime? Who would pay for the rebuilding? None of this is clear. None of this is clear. And the reality, I think, for many is Palestinians are still facing genocide. The ceasefire has been incredibly important to see the end of shelling, mostly. But they are still facing the consequences and the day-to-day reality of starvation, of lack of shelter, of lack of clean water. The hospitals are still not functioning.
Genocide is still underway. And while that’s true, all people can think about is how am I going to feed my children tonight? What will I feed them tomorrow?
For more information, visit the Institute for Policy Studies website at ips-dc.org/new-internationalism.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Phyllis Bennis (29:31) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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